Who Reads Blogs?

I started blogging about four months ago. I often heard references to blogs and became curious to experience what blogs were and what was required to start one. At the time I had one wife and two friends I hoped would read my blog. I had never read a blog until I prepared to begin one. I was never a blog reader before I became a blog writer.

As I looked for blogs to read, I found that I was lost in a vast sea of blogs, millions of miles of blogs, more blogs than the waves on the sea, and no means of navigation. (One thing which will result from the Big Bang of the Blogosphere is surely a demand for a really useful, fine tuned blog search engine.) As I looked at blogs and discovered the nature of them, I began to feel, “Bloggers, bloggers everywhere, and not a blog to read.” I found the “washed my hair this morning and here’s my grocery list” blog; the “must take Fido to the vet, and here are five dozen pictures of him” blog; the “blurry photographs of the Rats concert last night – sorry about the column between the camera and the stage” blog; the “pictures of the office party refreshments” blog; and of course the popular “OOOOOEEE, EGEAIGAE gotta do homework before Mom gets me, C ya” blog. More than anything else I found the blogger who lifts quotations from the day’s news and columnists and makes a few smart alecky remarks designed to mislead the reader into thinking that the blogger has some kind of inside knowledge and contacts.

I also stumbled on an occasional intelligent and thoughtful, or purely entertaining, blog. In blogging, as in novels and short stories, the author does not need some special knowledge or exotic material in order to be interesting. A blog about the events in an apparently uneventful life can be very absorbing if the blogger is sensitive, observant, and gifted at writing. For my taste, the best narratives are most often those which deal with the everyday lives of ordinary people – as in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ “Cross Creek”, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales, Eudora Welty, Katherine Mansfield, and scores of others – and so it is with blogs.

My point here was supposed to be that I did not begin reading blogs until I was preparing to start a blog. The next point is that after I started writing blogs I found myself with little time to read other people’s blogs. I suspect that the same is true of other bloggers; they are more occupied with what to write next, and with writing it, than they are with reading what other bloggers have written.

I don’t know if what happened to me is typical, but I did soon discover, among the millions, a couple of blogs I enjoyed, and through their links and comments I discovered others. I left comments on blogs, partly because I hoped that would lead people to look at mine. Nobody wants to write without readers. Yes, I wasn't content with my three captive readers; I wanted more.

When I find a comment on one of my blogs from someone I’ve never heard of, it means the system’s working. I’m thinking that the best process of exploring for blogs is starting at a single point and working outward through links and comments, rather than using some kind of search engine that combs the entire sea, especially since Google’s blog search seems to search the whole Web rather than just blogs. The few blog visitors that seem to have found me through Google key words have been “watchdogs” looking for politically incorrect enemies to attack.

So, the blogger expands his circle of friends and tries to keep up with their blogs and to leave comments, thus keeping the system flowing – but it seems to me that devotion to one’s own blog writing keeps the active circle from getting very big even if one is keenly interested in reading the other blogs. Maybe that explains why people who were regular readers of my blogs, people who showed enthusiasm and often commented, have disappeared after a few weeks. Of course you can say that it might be because I’m boring, but that doesn’t explain why they remained so interested for a number of weeks. I think they are simply too absorbed by their own blog writing to keep up with mine, especially if they’ve been exposed to fresh blogs they want to read. All things considered, one can read only so many blogs a day.

Which leads me to wonder how many blogs most bloggers read. Not very many, I’d guess. One measure might be the comments. Some blogs amaze me by almost immediately getting 30 or 40 comments on a new post, while other blogs, which may be more deserving, are lucky to get 2 or 3. I’ve seen brilliant blogs with almost no comments, and crude blogs which cause stampedes of readers competing to post their comments first. In the case of the stampede, however, most of the comments are puerile and inane – on the order, “I was first!” or “Hugs and kisses”, or “Screw everybody.” Still, they got there somehow. I don’t know how. I'm guessing that most bloggers don't read more than a dozen other blogs regularly, or at most twenty.

At last, my big question: Bloggers don’t have as much time to read blogs as non-bloggers, and so is there a big blog-reading audience of non-bloggers out there? Are there many people who look forward every day to reading blogs, but who don’t write a blog? I’m guessing (just guessing) that the relative number of people who read blogs and don’t write them is much smaller than the relative number of people who read books and don’t write them. The number of authors of published novels and other books is, and always has been, miniscule in proportion to the number of people who read those books. In the printed paper world a writer is a rarity and readers are everywhere. In the blog world it’s just the opposite. The writers probably outnumber the readers.

Where can such a system lead? Blogging feels like a big wave of the future, and we’re told it is becoming more and more important, but without a big wave of readers, what mass effectiveness will it have? As far as I can tell, we bloggers are clustered together in very, very small tribes gathered around millions of separate campfires which have little communication among them. What can come of that? Maybe the answer is that blogging will remain more a form of self-amusement than of communication to a large audience.